General Question

Why did my letter c not work 15 minutes ago?

I have a laptop corei5 Aspire S3 windows 8.1, and my letter c stopped working for no apparent reason. I did a virus scan and it didn’t find any viruses. qwertyuiopasdfghjklzxcvbnm works for now. I need the letter c for my password, So I could use help in case it happens again.

I vote that there are some food bits under the keys. I clean my pc keyboard regularly by turning the laptop off, tilting it sideways, and blowing on the keys with compressed air. It’s amazing how much stuff flies out of there.

How old is the laptop? Keypads do wear out. When mine went south once, it was first evidenced by a “drifting” cursor on the monitor screen, even though my mouse was perfectly still and I wasn’t operating the joystick or touchpad. Later, as my keypad worsened (and I still didn’t understand what was wrong) my center keys stopped working: in particular, I, J and K started to fail frequently.

At that point I called IT support (it was a work machine), and a half-hour later I had a new and perfectly functioning keypad (the surface under the keys that the keys operate) installed.

Your issue may very well be a foreign object under the key. I’d try @LuckyGuy‘s recommendation as the fix that is least intrusive and least likely to cause damage. Removing keys can be a problem; I’ve seen the attachment parts break as that was attempted.